okay, someone said “the diversity center”. now it’s called “Department of Multicultural Life”. that term is quite telling in what kind of space in your mental priority racial diversity occupies in the minds of young white liberal organizers.

institutioanl responsibility committee and the issue of proxi purchasing (investments) SRC was not given direct access to college’s investment records but they can request what they want and obtain it indirectly, which slows down the entire process.

in 1998 when SLAC was just getting started, a math professor who ran the investments was not willing to give out info but said that most of the investments go to mutual funds, which cannot be controlled, and only 25% today is through individual stocks (over which you can control social responsibility of the respective company policies), but it’s still not much

michael talked about establishing an archivist, i talked about getting alumns to just come and talk about their perspectives (was this too weak?) like federico helfgott did with his antiwar activism last fall.

told the group about SoC recruiting and how lorne robinson sucked at mulitcultural admissions, and particular local high schools, how they weren’t even getting applications, and how he got smashed during the alumni of color reunion but it was too anedotic, i didn’t work in the front lines in this issue, and my impression is that the people were listening to it just out of respect for the one (out of two) people of color in the room.

also commented a bit on the website and what these guys need is something a lot simpler than what civispace provides. even the facebook might accomplish their level of organizing, the only drawback being that they would need to go all the way back to the alumni office to get their mac alumni email addresses. (they just need to be able to CONTACT other students/alumns, for godssake)

the alternate funding project seems a bit divisive at htis point, several questions arising. what daniel points out is that we won’t ever really reach a level of funding at which the school administration will have to negotiate with us just in order to get the money. no real power. hmm

1. I know they are googlable. I can choose to make them searchable or not, and I chose to make them googlable. (robots.txt can control that) I do so to make myself purposefully vulnerable.

2. this is not livejournal

3. I take people’s comments out of context when I like. You are welcome to challenge their proper contextuality.

4. The term “diversity center” that I heard was thrown out carelessly, in order to bring some degree of “color” into that meeting, and so I keep believing that term was paradigmatic of people’s awareness of issues of students of color, even when I might not be a domestic student of color myself. I didn’t mention the name of the person who said it because back then I was angry but now I don’t remember who it was.

K: that group shouldn’t have left
Y: but if they want to split apart, that should be fine!
K: the two groups didn’t talk to each other, there was no communication!
Y: that’s a problem but still, if they want to split, that should be fine!

after the meeting

Y: you know why the dems lost in the 2004 elections? because those stupids thought that by getting everyone together they would get more votes and win! they actually lost people who steered away because there wasn’t anything interesting going on, everyone knew kerry would never say anything that stuck him out too much, and see what happened
K: i don’t think that splitting in many parts is good. see, we learned the other day that the European political system was superior because there were so many [countries? parties?] of them, and China was weak because it was a one party system, but look now where china is economically despite the one-part system..
Y: what! and you even care to refute that!
K: bah, i won’t talk to you

afterthought: who the hell says these days that europe was strong because there were many of them? they were all together in the business of colonizing the world! what was the berlin conference about? who the hell needs to refute that kind of crap? wait wait, people teach that at mac? oh my.

Medical Anthropology
Short paper on current issues in infectious diseases
February 25, 2005
Yongho Kim

Poliomyelitis, called “polio” for short, is a viral infectious disease affecting mostly young children between the age of 3 to 5 years. It is caused by the poliovirus, with three recognized strains – non-paralytic, spinal paralytic, and bulbar – and transmitted through mouth contact with fecally infected water or foods. The virus attacks parts of the central nervous system (the spinal column or the brain stem depending on the strain), causing first fever, vomiting, headaches, pains in the neck and extremities, paralysis and/or death. (Wikipedia, 2005) The virus has a long permanence time, up to 35 days, and is usually found when the child presents floppy and lifeless limbs, a condition known as the acute flaccid paralysis (AFP).(More …)

theories in our anthropological paper is a way to explain something. the variable is the thing to be explained.

paper 1
building of dams affects women’s livelihoods in a particular river valley in Senegal. variable is the dam and new irrigation methods, which is to be explained, and the result of the dam being there is the affected livelihood of women as measured by employment, household income, and so forth

paper 2
prostitution is conceptualized as a particular thing in anthropological literature. E will draw upon his particular experience in mongolia where he massaged the feet of an old man and felt like a prostitute because he was providing a sexual service (unpaid, however) using this he will criticize one of his own papers that he wrote in another anthropology class and expand it to anthropology in general. here, the variable is the anthropologist’s conception of prostitution, and the result thereof is the current literature about prostitution.

fun term: prostitutive anthropology. how is anthropology perceived in prostitution? how is that anthropologist who hanged out with prostitute informants in DC and ended up singing in the car together while raining? (at C&C)

paper 3
nursing women in south africa are immigrating en masse to places like saudi arabia, britain, and so forth. there are pull and push factors: wages, satisfaction at the job, social instablity, (what else was here?) variable is all of the factors together

theories suggested: mimi sheller’s movement of bodies theory

paper 4
revival of shamanism in mongolian youth and how it relates to the revival of nationalism after the fall of communism in mongolia. weatherford indicates that just the “practice of shamanism among youth” is a invariable phenomenon, and that it doesn’t change – not a variable. i suggest that maybe the study should compare traditional perceptions of youth towards shamanism before the fall of communism to the revival post-fall, and that would give two differing situations where the two variables, revival of shamanism and neonationalism/fall of communism are correlating variables.

theories suggested: john fiske’s study of suburban white youth using hip hop from black urban youth as a cultural artifact through which they build up their own sense of belonging/resistance

observation: i think it was not clear throughout the class what we meant by “variable”. because it seemed to be one kind of thign in one paper, and then in the next paper it was on the other end of the equation.

weatherford: make sure you bring in the external theory because it fits well with what you want to talk about, not just because you want to show off how cool Foucault or Derrida are and/or you read them. a lot of the academic garbage produced these days comes from students trying to “identify” with a certain school of thought which they find cool/progressive but they are unable to articulate the theory with their actual research, because it was forced upon to start with. (this rings with Guneratne warning of scholars just dropping names to fit in with the rest of academia)

Assignment: One-page summary of the theory of your research paper. Does it belong to a particular type? Is it informed by particular types? If it cuts across theoretical lines, which theories does it cut across?

My research paper argues that social relationships among the GW riders is mediated through material objects. Furthermore, people identify with their motorcycles, their accessories, and accents. And talk to other people as if they themselves were portrayed in those obbjects. Therefore, it will rely on theories of the self, in particular Erving Goffman’s theories of presentation of the self in public spaces and games (chapter 5 of “Behavior in Public Spaces”, “Some Rules about Objects of Involvement”) looks promising. I just started reading them this week, and will take me a few days to go through his ideas.

I have only a basic familiarity with sociology and do not have enough time to delve into the sociological literature that concerns performance theory.

I may introduce theories used to talk about identity politics and racialized representations, but I am not sure how politically sensitive it is to use theories about underrepresented racial minorities on otherwise mainstream, if small, majority white (to my perception) middle class groups. If I did, however, I would use Suzanne Oboler’s Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States, Arlene Dávila’s Latinos, Inc: The Marketting and Making of a People, David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, and Manu DiBango’s “The Shortest Way Through”: Strategic Anti-essentialism in Popular Music